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July 24, 2014

(++++) COLD WORLD, COLD WAR

M.J. McGrath is really
hitting her stride in the third and best of her mystery stories featuring Inuit
hunter, guide and reluctant detective Edie Kiglatuk. Both Edie and the
supporting cast emerge as more fully human, better-developed characters in The Bone Seeker than in White Heat and The Boy in the Snow, and the largest character of all – the remote
High Arctic setting – is more thoroughly plumbed and is a fuller participant in
the action this time. As before, the region is a source of bitter cold, of
multiple kinds of ice (each with its own dangers), and of the rich Inuit
history in which all the books are steeped – a history that McGrath cleverly
connects with southern readers (meaning anyone from Alaska on down the map) by
having Edie herself be half Inuit and half qalunaat
(meaning southerner or non-Inuit; her father’s desertion of the family when
Edie was a child thus stands for qalunaat
neglect of or unconcern for all things Inuit). But here there is more: the
distant Arctic is a staging ground, chosen for its extreme remoteness, for
now-decaying observation posts left over from the Cold War, for modern-day
military training and maneuvers, and maybe for something so dangerous and
shadowy that secretive arms of the Canadian and U.S. governments will to go
frightening lengths to conceal its existence.

The government-conspiracy
angle could easily drift into cliché, and in fact has some weaknesses that
almost cause the book’s otherwise tight plotting to unravel: a too-dedicated
investigating lawyer from Guatemala who is “disappeared” in a
less-than-believable scene, and a change of heart from a character that is
crucial to the wrapup of the plot but is quite unrealistic in context and never
satisfactorily explained. Nevertheless, the Cold War overlay is what makes The Bone Seeker more than a murder
mystery – it begins as one but soon,
as Edie and her associates seek the killer, starts to have resonance that reaches
well beyond the killing of one of the girl students that Edie teaches in the
remote hamlet of Autisaq. That resonance comes from the past, or rather from
two different pasts: that of the southerners who have long exploited the Arctic
for their own political and military purposes and that of the Inuit, for whom
the past lives side-by-side with the present in a land where bones do not decay
and remnants of history may reappear anytime as the ice shifts unpredictably.

This is not the first time McGrath has
explored the ways in which these two pasts intersect in Edie’s life and the
life of those around her. For example, White
Heat refers to the contamination of Arctic sea life by PCBs whose source
may have been “Russian nuclear plants [or] wartime radar stations [or] U.S.
naval submarines.” But McGrath pulls the elements of this story together with a
surer hand than she has shown before. The difficult and crotchety Inuit elders,
long a thorn in Edie’s side, are crucial to the plot of The Bone Seeker, and the old Inuit beliefs and superstitions turn
out to have completely germane connections both to the murder and to the
mysteries of the Arctic’s military past and present. The way in which McGrath
ties together Inuit reproductive difficulties and government indifference to
Cold War policy effects makes this book far more tightly knit than the previous
two, and far more chilling in ways that go beyond the bleakness (to southern
eyes) of the landscape in which the events play out. The fact that The Bone Seeker is loosely based on real
events may be one thing that gives it particular resonance, but it is McGrath’s
growing skill at showing Edie and the other fictional characters as real human
beings – whose actions are intimately connected with their personalities rather
than dictated by the exigencies of the plot – that really gives this novel its
impact.

The Bone Seeker contains passing references to events of the two
prior Edie Kiglatuk novels, and it does help to have read them in order to have
a full appreciation of what happens here – Edie’s attitude toward alcohol, for
instance, after her abuse of it (a common problem among the Inuit) ruined her
marriage and nearly destroyed her life, as well as her feelings toward her ex’s
son, Willa, in light of what happened to Willa’s brother, Joe, in White Heat. However, it is perfectly
possible to read and understand The Bone
Seeker without being familiar with the prior books – and given the skill
with which McGrath handles matters here, this novel may be a better entry to
the series than either prior one. Readers who start here are very likely to
want to go back to the earlier Edie Kiglatuk books to gain additional
perspective, much as Edie herself finds that she must delve into the past, hers
and the Arctic’s, to solve intertwined mysteries whose tragic consequences are
personal and intimate and wide-ranging and far-reaching, all at the same time.